My experiment with not being tracked. Distinctly odd.
Over the past 2 years, I have ended tracking by web sites for most purposes. On my phone I only use Firefox Focus, and Tor. On my PC I use regular firefox, but only for business. I also use Tor. I am tracked by Amazon for purchases.
Now, I consistently get ads for women’s wigs, fake eyelashes, corsets, body shapers, garters, stockings, high heels, and frilly girl stuff. It’s quite persistent, particularly on my phone. It has also invaded Facebook some with girly stuff. I suspect once the algorithms decide something like that, it’s very hard to change its “mind”.
I thought about why this is. And then I realized that the sole primary remaining information on me is gmail’s parsing of email data, and Facebook’s metadata of connections. And I have Skype connections too, but Skype is not supposed to be tracking. Does the new, Microsoft-Skype sell metadata? Does Facebook parses every private message just as Google parses every email. A friend in France and I tried some experiments in tracking 6 or 7 years ago — we put things like nudist and naturist into gmails to each other. Then we waited to see how long it would take to come up on Facebook ads. For naturism, it took a couple of days. But for some things, it appeared to take about 20 minutes. However, parsing of your communications content doesn’t actually matter that much for meta-data purposes.
In my case, I have multiple connections and conversations with trans and gay people on Facebook, in gmail, and on Skype, mostly because of the paper I wrote on human chimerism and sexuality. Just knowing that and frequency of interactions should be enough. I also have a medium post in that area. Does online sales targeting include a person’s medium account? If it doesn’t it could be something interesting to mine, and again, metadata. I also have some professional work on HIV. To a sales targeting AI, that seems to mean I want to buy women’s clothing and hang around in bars wearing jewelry.
For those unclear what meta-data is in this context, it means all the connections you have, and the degree of activity on them. So, the fact you sent emails to Mr. McGillicuddy, or Ms. Megabeans is meta-data. Instant messages, or text messages mean the same thing. It’s data about the data that you sent. There is a wonderful explanation of the value of this, called “Using Meta-data to Find Paul Revere”. Facebook is a massive meta-data system, that also has access to all the actual data that you put out. Your friends list can say things about you. But who you send instant messages to means more.
Even secure data transmission services like WhatsApp can collect your meta-data and frequency of exchanges with each connection, if they don’t record the data itself.
It’s interesting to me that Amazon appears to stand alone here tracking what I might like pretty well. That makes sense because for Amazon, it probably means more to suck up all the metadata about you from everyone else, and then have their own algorithms for what you actually buy. Amazon selling their data on what you want to buy? That would eliminate a competitive advantage for Amazon. It makes sense that Bezos wouldn’t do that. Whatever else you might say about Jeff, he’s no dummy when it comes to that sort of thing.
That brings us to a pretty interesting conclusion if I am correct (and I think I am). If I were Jeff Bezos I would want to end tracking on the website ecosystem to the extent possible. This would then make it so much harder for any other system to compete, because of the size and volume advantage. Even better, it would cripple Facebook and cause a big hit to Google as well, because they would have less quality data to collate and sell. Amazon would thus lower its costs for purchase of buying and search decisions, while maintaining dominance.
My conclusion is that I don’t think that people are actually going to like what happens when they are not tracked anymore. And aside from possibly presenting you with hilarious ads, I think it will hurt small businesses and startups. I think it will cause the biggest economic harm to mid-size companies that are large enough to need to spend heavily on sales targeting, but not large enough that they own the market like Amazon does. In the long run, I suspect it may hurt Apple a lot more than Apple thinks it will at the moment. I’m not saying this because I like it. I like privacy. I have an aversion to the invasion of my life by marketing data collection. It feels creepy. I’m just following my observations to their logical conclusion here. I don’t think it will turn out the way privacy advocates think it will.
